Monday, April 24, 2006
(2:24 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Abortion: A Stalinist Perspective
From a NY Times article on the circular firing squads forming within American Evangelicalism:"What's interesting is many times these folks [Jim Wallis, et al.] can't get worked up in a lather about 45 million babies killed," he [a conservative evangelical] said.Killing one baby is a tragedy. Killing 45 million is a statistic.
Because as we all know, when women get abortions, it's morally equivalent to taking an infant that has been brought to full term -- wearing a diaper and a cute little "onesie", having just nursed, cooing and smiling -- and then murdering it in cold blood.
At a gut level, aside from the most hardened anti-abortion terrorists, everyone, and I mean everyone has to understand that an abortion and the murder of an infant simply are not the same thing, in fact are qualitatively different -- to such an extent that the comparison itself is obscene.
A quote:
By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial or professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my sons, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day. (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death)Mt. Moriah is of course the place where children are sacrificed, real post-born children -- sacrificed to national security perhaps, but perhaps also simply to convenience, the convenience of knowing, perhaps, that one will always be able to fill up one's gas tank at an affordable price. How many children died under sanctions in Iraq, sacrificed in our attempt to get at Saddam? How many more died and continue to die every day, in Iraq alone, because of our war to control our right to oil? How many children have to die of cholera, for instance, because of the graft that keeps Iraqi utilities from being brought up to the level they were at under the demon Saddam?
Or through sheer indifference -- how many real post-born children died in Darfur because we didn't give a fuck? Or Rwanda (at least we apologized, right!)? Or anywhere in Africa, born with AIDS, born to die of starvation, because the system as it is set up means that it is more profitable to throw food away than to feed them? How many children died in New Orleans? How many children's growth is stunted and future hopes destroyed because we didn't want to support single black welfare queens anymore?
That's all a statistic, too, I suppose, and the progress of history, the implacable forces of the market, will absolve us of all those sacrifices, all those necessary evils. Those necessary sacrifices, necessary above all to maintain "our way of life," our non-negotiable way of life that for so many others is a way of death -- no one is going to "get worked up in a lather" over those. The sacrifices that are unacceptable are the ones of the pre-born, those given death before having fully been given life, sacrificed -- so we assume -- to the convenience of the moment, to the thoughtless indulgence of sexual pleasure outside its proper bounds, sacrificed for the sake of something against "our way of life" or what should be our way of life. A testimony, in short, to the sickness of our society -- while all these other sacrifices, of real post-born children, every single day, in all the tedium and banality of a statistical digest, these other sacrifices are our strength. And one cannot even begin to work up the "lather" that would be equal to the enormity of that crime, the capital crime of our life together that we commit every single day without a second thought or even a first.
